Bells, Brokers, Blue Jackets, and Bartiromo: It’s the New York Stock Exchange Show!

Last week, on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, only days after NYSE Euronext announced its planned merger with the Deutsche Boerse, three Green Bay Packers on a post-Super Bowl press junket arrived to ring the closing bell. The football players entered in suits and ties, dwarfing those around them in stature and giving All-American toothpaste grins. Posing for photographers, they acted out the role of frenzied floor specialists at a bank of telephones in the middle of the floor. When asked about the phones and whether they really worked, a female floor trader lounging against the counter of her booth looked bored. “Those are for show,” she said.

A lot feels like it’s for show on the trading floor these days: The blue jackets with mesh backs recall an age of sweaty frenzy that’s since been replaced by automated calm; the bits of paper, empty Splenda packets and peanut shells strewn across the floor are tiny remnants of the mountains of paper from earlier days. Instead of running around yelling at each other, most traders quietly recline in chairs. Like the blocked-off streets around Wall Street itself, the trading floor is eerily subdued and depopulated. It feels more like a weekday morning in an empty casino than the hotbed of American capitalism.

At 3:59 p.m., the football players ascended to the podium and burst into applause. To ring the closing bell—or, as it’s now called, The Closing Bell®—does not actually involve ringing a bell, just pressing a button. A sustained noise between a school bell and a car alarm rang out, while the football players continued clapping. After descending from the podium, Ryan Grant, a Packers running back who had visited the NYSE when he was in high school, looked a tiny bit disappointed. “There were more people here 10 years ago!” he said.

Since 2005, when the NYSE ceased to be the financial equivalent of a public utility, few people outside of Wall Street have grasped the difference between the New York Stock Exchange as it actually is today and “the New York Stock Exchange” we think we are watching when some people in blazers rush around holding papers behind Maria Bartiromo. Take Senator Charles Schumer, who recently initiated a campaign to ensure that the new German-American company continues to have “New York Stock Exchange” in its name. Despite holding a seat on the Senate Finance Committee, Mr. Schumer recently called the NYSE “the cradle of American capitalism” and “a national treasure.”

“In America,” he lamentably continued, “we start each day in our Congress and in our classrooms with the Pledge of Allegiance, and we also start it with the ringing of the bell on the floor of the stock exchange.”

But while Mr. Schumer gets mileage by evoking the NYSE’s glory days, the reason that it is merging with the German Deutsche Boerse is because neither one actually makes a lot of money through trading stocks anymore.

“If you think of the New York Stock Exchange, you think of it trading stocks in New York and in the U.S.,” said Bernard Donefer, a professor of finance at Baruch College. “That’s the smallest part of its revenue.”

Mr. Schumer is not the only one confused, however. At the ringing of the bell, Green Bay cornerback Charles Woodson had his own share of soaring rhetoric: “We had about 11 million viewers in the Super Bowl,” he said with emotion. “But for a minute, we just controlled the world.”

In fact, when he ran the closing bell last week, Charles Woodson controlled only about 27 percent of the world. That’s what the New York Stock Exchange’s market share of the American equities trade is today—a marked drop from the 48 percent share it had five years ago. NASDAQ, the other American stock exchange most people know, has dropped from a market share of 26 percent to 19 percent, but it still has a famous bell and a commonly known brand name.